Election campaigning for generation Y
Stickers, pins, posters, huge hands, a website, clips on TV and the internet. It’s always the same and we know that. This campaigning style worked fine for decades. In past I participated in election campaigns in Germany, staying in a shopping promenade and giving away brochures, tried to “sell” memberships for my party. But politicians have to make a change if they want to reach younger voters, if they want to vote them at the ballots.
Due to a friend from Australia I joined the messenger Telegram which, as I found out, offered a huge range of bots to “communicate” with. There were bots to find girls (or boys) you may like, an image bot and a lot more. And I was (and still am) interested in AI-bots and virtual assistants such as Facebook’s M for Messenger which should help you to order a table in a restaurant or flowers or an Uber. While reading about the bots I had an idea.
Campaigning Bots! A candidate, on Telegram I used to experiment with my own as a candidate (Christian Kramp for President 2016 — unfortunately not possible as I am not [yet] a citizen of the USA and wasn’t born their or have parents like Ted Cruz), could run a bot and get in touch with younger voters, e.g. college students. Now they could send commands (sounds fine, right? Sending a command to a politician who wants to go to D.C.?) with a topic and get the answers. Do you want an example?
User: /education
CK2016Bot: My priority is to improve the education system. Education of course is subject to the states and not the federal government. But as president of the United States I want to improve the quality of our school system to make America a better place. Raise the wages for teachers, raise the standards and then we raise the living quality for everybody in the USA!
User: /defenseprojects
CK2016Bot: The federal government has to limit expenses for defense without jeopardising our armed forces. It must be our task to control the expenses for projects to avoid huge, unresponsible projects like the F-35 “Raptor” project. No American family could waste its money in a way we did.
It’s just an example, but you can imagine how many different options are possible, how many different questions and answers can exist. Of course it doesn’t allow a real conversation and if the user is just a silent consumer you may worry about the effects we can see by reference to the followers of Donald Trump.
On the other hand I always teach the self-responsibility to educated adults who should be able to make a fact-check.
I think it is likely that liberal candidates, such as Hillary Clinton or Senator Sanders, are using bots. President Barack Obama was a light-tower for the usage of social media in 2008 and 2012. Now it is time for a newer generation.
I’m Christian Kramp and I approved this article.